


Axefall

by castle



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 06:46:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castle/pseuds/castle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein rocks fall but surprisingly few die, one matespritship is tested and another is formed, two fight scenes occur, two named characters die, and Rose speaks at great, great length.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Axefall

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Seam by Seam](https://archiveofourown.org/works/242564) by [sunbreaksdown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbreaksdown/pseuds/sunbreaksdown). 



> Seam By Seam is a fic that cries out for a sequel so badly that the author herself wrote two: [a cheery mildly canonical one,](http://sunbreaksdown.tumblr.com/post/11476288914/seam-by-seam-8-5-8-rose-kanaya-centric) and a [vastly more depressing one.](http://sunbreaksdown.tumblr.com/post/20666781812/seam-by-seam-kanaya-rose-vriska) So I wrote one as well. The sequel pile doesn’t stop from getting higher.
> 
> Much credit is due to [this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_English-language_idioms_derived_from_baseball) for helping me to write plausible Americans being loudly American at each other.

> _“Subject’s responses to [the questionnaire] varied from the correct probability by as much as [50%], and were [90%] confident in their answer, even when incorrect… If there is a conclusion to be reached from this study, it is that people are wrong almost all of the time, and staggeringly overconfident even when grossly ignorant.”_  
>  —Kurusawa et. al. “A metareview of cognitive biases.” 2012

Rose had really thought that her act of defiance would change everything.

Which, in hindsight, had been perhaps premature. Kanaya, she was sure, (and had been _as_ sured) would like nothing more than a perfectly boring matespiritship, without the dramatic vacillations and casual murder of Troll romance.

Rose, however, was still the same person. She had changed the relationship dramatically, but she had neglected to change herself, which was turning out to be much harder.

For example, right now she is looking at a washtub, and a stiff brush.

The floors are _fine._ Not perfect, but. Mostly okay. She doesn’t need to clean them now. She could put it off for another week. Kanaya wouldn’t say a thing. Probably wouldn’t even notice. Even if she did, she would go far out of her way _not_ to say anything, which is how bad of a Mistress she is.

Rose unclenches her hands. This isn’t helping. Think about something else. The brush.

The brush? Just a simple hand brush. It’s not even on a pole, to save your back or knees, since the only class of person that would be manually cleaning a floor is a slave. The degradation was most important thing about the tool, with “clean floors effectively” coming in at a distant second. Why else have a slave?

Rose glances at the worn-out old broom next to the pail. The broom that she had been meaning to throw away. Hmm.

* * *

The hacksaw had not been the perfect tool for the job, and neither had the nails she had been able to find, but after applying liberal amounts of epoxy putty to the gap between the shaft and the brush, she had successfully performed **brush** && **broom** == **long-handled floor brush.**

Rose laughs. She had _made_ something. She couldn’t wait to show Kanaya.

Her delighted smile fades, and is replaced by the first glimmering of guilt. There probably hadn’t been a long-handled brush on Alternia in centuries. Floors were cleaned either by robots, (poorly) or by slaves. The only person who would ever use a long-handled brush was a free Troll.

She had forgotten her place.

Rose viciously twists the handle off the brush, the cheap wood splintering, and spend the rest of the day scrubbing floors with the jagged points of her arrogance digging into her palms, as punishment.

_Stupid girl._

_Idiot bitch._

* * *

“Stupid idiot bitch girl. You missed a spot.”

Rose redoubles her efforts with the floor brush. She doesn’t know Alternian very well, yet, and she has to concentrate hard to understand precisely what terrible names the trainer is calling her, which isn’t easy with the headache she’s had for the last week.

“Maybe you’re not good enough to be a maid. Maybe we lock you up with one of the males, see how you do as a breeding sow.”

The smallest hitch in the mechanical, repetitive motions of her scrubbing. An empty threat. The Trolls weren’t big on asking permission. If they were going to do that, they would have done it already. Also, she’s stopped menstruating, so she wouldn’t even be good enough to do that.

“If it pleases you, sir.”

He laughs, which means either he didn’t spot the sarcasm, or her grasp of tone isn’t good enough to convey it. He turns to Jade, scrubbing along next to her. “See? A good slave _obeys._ ”

Jade keeps her head down, and says nothing.

* * *

Rose is preparing a meal with Troll-cable-news on in the background. It is there she learns that the world is ending.

First, it’s a fluke asteroid impact which destroys a factory on Alternia’s outermost moon. Pure bad luck, a random tragedy.

One minute and a half dozen impacts later, the threat is upgraded to a meteor swarm. The density is such that there must be thousands of them, and the hastily rendered projection shows the cloud is scheduled to sweep through Alternia within minutes.

At this point, the television goes out.

Rose looks to Kanaya, standing frozen beside her. At some point their hands had clasped, though Rose can’t remember if her hand had sought out Kanaya’s or vice versa.

She looks upwards, expecting death at any minute.

…

Nothing happens.

…

At all.

…

“This is ridiculous. We can’t continuously cower here for the next however many hours,” Rose says.

“Well. There really isn’t anywhere to go. Slaves aren’t allowed in the bunkers, and I’m not highblooded enough to be allowed entrance either.”

“I was under the impression that jade was fairly rare.”

“Jade is _very_ rare, but rare does not mean valuable.”

“Ah.”

They’re chatting almost normally, as if they’re not about to die. The back of Rose’s neck prickles, and her paranoia is in full swing. “They said it was asteroids. How could this solar system still have asteroids? One of the first things the UN Space Navy did in Sol system was clear out the Earth-threatening rocks, and that was back in the 80s.”

“I don’t know. Alternia is supposed to be safe from any harm.”

That chill again. “So was Earth. Could this be an attack?”

Kanaya spreads her arms. “I have no idea whatsoever.”

Rose looks down at a half-prepared lunch she may not live long enough to eat, and the tension manifests as a bizarre laugh. “This is ridiculous,” she repeats.

* * *

They establish that the phones don’t work either, nor does the internet connection. This makes sense, as all three services run over the same fiber optic cable. It would help the disaster-movie ambiance of the scene immensely if the power had the good grace to fail, but Kanaya’s hive has its own reactor, and a hundred sweeps of fuel. There is very little that can kill it.

(3 hours later, it stops working. But we’ll get to that.)

They have a short, inconclusive discussion, whose general topic is “Now what the fuck do we do?” Kanaya wants to go into town. Rose, carefully choosing her battles, does not tell Kanaya that a Troll should not be asking her slave for guidance, and instead points out that this seems like a great way to catch a rock. Kanaya admits that this is true, but what are we going to _do?_

That’s a good question. Rose tries to read a book, and after she catches herself absently rereading the same page over and over, for the third time; she gives up, and joins Kanaya in the garden.

“I see you have your chainsaw.”

“Yes, well. I thought I should have it at hand. Just in case.” She gestures at her garden. “It is the duty of every citizen to die protecting her homeworld against invasion.”

A memory jostles its way to the forefront of her attention. “I would very much rather you did not do that, Kanaya.”

A smile curves one side of her face. “It was not a duty I was looking forward to shouldering.”

They go to bed. What else are they going to do?

* * *

Rose wakes up early, having, for obvious reasons, slept poorly. She slips out of bed and dresses quietly, not wanting to wake Kanaya, and walks to the kitchen, to maybe eat something. She didn’t bother with slippers, her sleep-fogged brain deciding that taking five seconds to slip them on wasn’t worth it, and Rose deeply regrets it halfway to the respiteblock; the freon-chilled concrete floor sucking the heat out of her feet. (Of the many, many things the Troll race has nothing but contempt for, the ozone layer is one.) She reaches her destination at a peculiar, fast high-stepped walk, which is mediocre at accomplishing the goal of minimizing skin contact with the floor, but very successful at making her look silly; and hits the wall switch.

The lights won’t turn on.

“Shit.”

She glances out the window. Then stops, transfixed.

Then she goes to go wake up Kanaya.

* * *

“Space combat.”

They stand outside, in the chill of the desert at night, and watch the most incredible coruscation that Rose has ever seen. Explosions of light which burst instantly, then fade slowly, (nuclear explosions) the drive flames of what must be ships in orbit, (few in number, and growing fewer) scores upon scores of meteors, (debris hitting the atmosphere) and an aurora borealis which is so bright that Rose could read by its light.

“Yes?”

“I’ve never seen it from the surface of a planet, but it cannot be mistaken.” She pauses, then points. “There is something, however. The impression I’ve always gained from movies of naval conquest and the news is that space combat takes place _between ships,_ or at least against defense platforms. I see _our_ ships, climbing to a higher orbit, but I do not see who they are fighting.”

 _Shit._ “I find myself hoping, for the first time in my life, that the Alternian military know what they’re doing.”

They go down to the basement, to try and figure out why the lights aren’t working. Rose, her mind absently rattling along the engraved rails of the “power failure” flowchart, asks Kanaya if she has any flashlights that they could use to see in the dark.

Kanaya smiles brightly at her, and it takes Rose two long seconds to realize that, ha ha, yes, Kanaya glows in the dark, you utter moron. Rose groans, Kanaya laughs, and they descend. That treacherous part of her mind which insists on casting everything that happens to her as if her life was a lurid romance novel composes an extremely sappy metaphor about being guided through darkness, and Rose successfully refrains from gagging out loud.

The instrument panel, as well as several shutoff valves and maintenance connections, are at the lowest level of the basement. There is also a two metre thick concrete plug blocking the access shaft to the part of the reactor which actually bangs hydrogen atoms together. Molded into its surface is a wide variety of hair-raising warnings.

Troll warning signs tend to go into more detail than the simple ideograms preferred by humans, and even in the coarse medium of concrete, some anonymous genius has very effectively depicted flesh melting from bone with elegant cross-hatching.

The panel displays an error code. Fortunately, an inch-thick instruction manual is attached, so Kanaya blows a dozen sweeps worth of dust off it, cracks its spine, and looks it up.

Hilariously, the manual actually has a section titled, “In Case Of Space Based Nuclear War.” It advises that the circuit breakers will trip when EMP is detected, but restarting the reactor “is inadvised, if nuclear exchange is still in progress.”

“My word, just how many wars like these has Alternia seen?”

“Not invasions, but internecine nuclear wars?” Kanaya starts counting, and Rose stops her when she loses count after she passes 16. It would seem that the political unity Alternia now enjoys was not achieved without some effort, and only now does it occur for Rose to worry about the origin of the desert she’s been living on the for the last three years.

* * *

The invaders land at midday.

By the time Kanaya retrieves her binoculars, the landing craft has rolled to a stop, and soldiers are pouring out of it.

They are low-slung, four legged creatures, like enormous, waist-high headless armored dogs. Rose could almost swear that they _were_ dogs, if it wasn’t for the obvious intelligence they displayed in their coordination, and the fact that they just flew down in a spaceship after completely fucking up Alternia; an act which was beyond that of a simple animal. Still, though…

Kanaya says she does not recognize the species. A bad sign.

The craft has been emptied of soldiers, and now disgorges a vehicle.

“That is a fucking tank.”

A tank, but not a familiar one. It didn’t have the sleek, half-melted look of Alternian vehicles. In fact, it looks positively _clunky_ , all flat planes and fiddly bits in awkward places.

It is followed by a biped.

Rose puts the binoculars down for a moment, because her eyes are abruptly swimming, and she can’t see anything. Ridiculous. Very little of his skin is visible, he is very far away, and he may have small horns hidden under that helmet. The conclusion her brain has lept to is utterly ridiculous.

She presses the glasses to her face again. The biped has entered the tank. She recognizes, now, the symbols painted on its glacis.

They’re Arabic numerals.

Well. There’s that.

* * *

Rose has been working on remaining conscious, lately, and does not actually faint in shock.

“A human tank. They’re humans.”

Kanaya glances at her reproachfully, then takes the binoculars. “I seem to recall you scoffing at my suggestion earlier.”

“Okay, I was wrong. I guess the human race has become more violently reckless since I was last on Earth.”

“So now what?”

Rose stares at the wall. Unreal. It was all so unreal. “Go outside to meet them, I guess.”

“I don’t…”

“If they’re a human rescue mission, then they’ll take any excuse to kill you, Mistress.” _Oops, watch your language._ “I don’t know if— I can’t protect you if I’m not with you.”

* * *

They watch the column approach the hive from the garden, their hands entangled. It is impossible to tell who gripped more strongly, a mutual clutch.

One of the dog-robots approaches them. It circles them, examining their bodies, closely inspecting waistlines and armpits for hidden weapons.

Then, unexpectedly, it speaks. “Rose Lalonde?”

“Yes?”

It had a flat male American accent, unspeakably strange after listening Kanaya butcher esses for the last couple years.

“Is there anybody in the house?”

“No.”

“OK.” It briefly looks at Kanaya, then bounces over to the entrance, where several other of the machines have gathered.

The biped emerges from the tank, and walks over.

“Howdy, Rose. Captain Jake Stross. Sorry for the delay. Wanted to make sure neither of you were standing on a land mine.”

She nods, not confident in her voice.

“Time to go home, Rose.”

 _Crunch!_ One of the robots has smashed in the door, and now they piles inside.

“It wasn’t _locked,_ ” says Kanaya with a degree of irritation.

The solider looks at her, but does not seem to know quite what to say to that. “Ah.”

He blinks, and focuses on Rose again. “Is there anything you need to take with you, keeping in mind that you’ll never be on this planet again? _Small, light_ personal items?”

“A journal.” Rose glances at Kanaya, and she looks upwards. Stross points. “ _Quickly._ We’ll get the book.”

Kanaya heads for the stairs, a robot following closely behind. Rose and the soldier headed for her room, but as soon as Kanaya was out of view he grabbed her arm and started pulling her towards the door, his grip not cruel, but very, very firm.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t believe I lost that bet. I lied to get her out of the room. We are going, right now.”

Rose’s head spins. This is really just too much.

_Do something. Say something._

“No.”

She can’t believe she just said that.

“You can’t do that. I’ll scream.”

“I can just have one of the dogs pull her head off, you know.” Something he sees in her face makes him stop walking. “I don’t understand you. She’s a _troll._ She _purchased_ you. What the fuck can you possibly be thinking, here?”

“Kanaya isn’t like that. I have been an _incredibly_ poor slave. My insolence would have gotten me killed in the first hour in the service of any other master. She learned _English_ just to talk to me. There’s maybe ten Trolls on the planet who would bother learning the language of a slave race.”

She isn’t being persuasive enough. It occurs to Rose that she is literally arguing to save someone’s life. Thinking about that isn’t helping.

Shit. “ _Please._ ”

He attempts to press a hand against his forehead, and is interrupted by his faceshield. “This is so stupid. Fuck it, I’m kicking this one upstairs. You can be the General’s problem. Go get your diary, I’ll cover the exit.”

* * *

Fido glances through the doorway, and does not see anybody. Fido knew this already, because he did not hear the heartbeat of anybody, he did not smell anybody, and the farsight-which-sees-through-walls did not see anybody; but Alpha told the pack to look in every room personally, so Fido is looking in every room personally.

Fido is happy. He spent a long, long time asleep in a cold place, but when he woke up with his brothers he was in a strange place with many new smells. His nose isn’t as good as it was before when he was small and everything hurt and the world moved so much faster, but it tells him that this new place is a very strange place yes it is. He wanted to look around when he was in the outside but Alpha was very excited to find the Good person. She was in the big house and there was also a Bad person there and Fido waited for Alpha to tell him to kill her but they talked for a long long time while Beta kept his feet still.

Fido is at the next room now but the door is closed so he reaches up with his strange new jointed paw and turns the knob and opens the door and nobody is inside. His hull temperature is 312 kelvin, which is not high enough that he needs to turn on the cooling unit.

Fido is happy.

* * *

Rose retrieves the diary with haste, and meets the officer at the front door. There is a moment of awkward silence, as they wait for Kanaya.

“What was the bet?”

He glances at her, then returns to staring out the window. “Penzler provoked me into betting him a hundred euros that you would be aiding and abetting your owner. He said that Stockholm syndrome always happened, without fail, because that is how human brains are wired. I said that you weren’t among humans, and that an American would never help the enemy.”

“I have been here for _eight years._ ”

“Yes, I can see now that I made an error of judgement. Never bet against a psychologist when it comes to human nature.”

Pause.

His tablet beeps. He looks at it, and swears. “I have got to have the worst fucking luck in the world. Eight minutes. I’ve been on the ground for _eight minutes,_ in the middle of the fucking desert, and we’ve already got hostiles.” He shows it to her. “Friends of yours?” Unspoken: _Any more trolls whose lives you want me to spare?_

It is an aerial view of a car bouncing along the road leading to Kanaya’s hive, presumably from one of the small aircraft the spaceship had released after landing. It is bracketed by a red box, an icon hanging off of it whose meaning is obvious.

It is Vriska’s car.

Rose stares at the wall. She plays out how this meeting will go: how Vriska will probably react to Human soldiers on Troll soil, what she will probably say, her demonstrated power over Human minds, and what she will inevitably try to do.

Rose also thinks of rolling pins.

“No.”

“Excellent.” He taps the icon, then confirms a warning box which pops up. She hears the high pitched hiss of a small rocket engine from the spacecraft, and shortly thereafter, the car on the screen messily explodes. A second later, a _crump_ reaches their ears.

Kanaya enters. “What was that?”

Jake lies, directly and obviously, to her face. “Nothing.” He looks at what she is holding. “And what is that?”

She holds the cage up so he can see what’s inside. “Zazzerpan the Wise.”

He sighs.

* * *

The inside of the tank is both cluttered and extremely spartan. Beige metal features heavily as a design element. There is a long, sparsely padded bench along each side. Stross sits down heavily on one bench, so they take the other.

It smells incredibly odd in here, the sharp chemical scent of plastics being exposed to oxygen for the first time. Alternia is sparse on petrochemicals, having exhausted its supply of oil two thousand years ago.

Stross picks up a small bag, unseals the top, and begins eating something out of it.

He notices her staring, and points the bag at Rose. “Peanut?”

“No thanks.” Something occurs to her. She had kept vague track of the months and years, but, “What date is it? On Earth?”

The captain tilts his wrist. “March first, 2012.”

Somehow this made it real. The trolls could have possibly captured a tank, and some robots, and a really stellar actor; but they never would have bothered to give the actor a watch. They’re actually in a Human tank, with a Human army officer, going back to the Human homeworld.

It’s really happening. She’s lightheaded.

“That’s shipboard time, though, which is going to be plus or minus ten minutes off of Earth time, thanks to the intersystem discontinuity, and time dilation effects.”

Rose sighs. How very male of him. Can’t just let the moment be, he has to add spurious, unneeded accuracy.

The handset on his shoulder crackles to life. “Zulu–2, status report.”

He presses a button on the microphone. “Comma–1 is secure. En route to population center,” He glances at the map, “Two two five one. No resistance encountered so far.”

Long pause. “Roger that, Zulu–2.”

“Another thing, Command.” He squeezes his eyes shut and grimaces.

Pause. “Yes?” _Time of light delay_ , Rose realizes belatedly. Command is in a ship in orbit.

“Comma–1 insisted on bringing a, uh, friend.”

Pause. “Err, alright, Zulu–2. We’ll figure that out shipside.”

“Roger. Zulu–2 out.”

He sighs, and leans back. “Well, at least he didn’t tell me to leave you here. That would have been a bitch.”

“We’re going to the city?”

“Troll military isn’t reacting nearly as quickly as we thought they would.” He has the distant, abstracted look of someone listening to multiple conversations in his earpiece. “This is a rapidly evolving situation. We’re going to dash into the city and try to recover Comma–2 through 5.” He looks around the interior of the tank. “Gonna get crowded in here. Might have to ride on top.”

“That sounds like it might be dangerous.” _Ugh, what an obvious statement._

“Well, I’m wearing armor. Might get one of the dogs to stand in front of me.”

He looks at Rose, considering something. Then, just as clearly, another thought occurrs to him, the good Captain not having much of a poker face. “How are a bunch of former slaves going to react to riding with a troll?”

Kanaya and Rose glance at each other. “That’s a good question.”

“Alright, our cover story is that you’re a prisoner, being taken back to Earth for study.” He unclips a pair of zipcuffs from his vest, then hesitates. “Could you, uh, or maybe Rose…”

Kanaya takes the cuffs from Jake, sticks her wrists through the holes, cinches them tight with her teeth, and wiggles her fingers at him. “Happy now?”

He laughs nervously.

* * *

Dave is having a pretty cool day so far.

The sky is falling. Like, fucking rocks are coming outta nowhere and fucking important shit up. His master spends a while yelling at people on the phone trying to figure out what is happening, then the phones go out. Then the power goes too. He takes out some frustration on Dave’s hide, then hits the ’coon, since it’s almost daylight, and he can’t go out so late.

Dave chills outside to watch the sun come up, and discovers that it’s snowing. Real big flakes. Leaflets, falling from the sky. The writing on them is in big bold human-blood-red English text, and then a smaller Alternian translation under each line in black, which is good, since he hasn’t read more than a couple words of English in a long fuckin’ time.

> EARTH RETURNS FOR ITS OWN  
>  FOR EVERY HUMAN THAT DIES  
>  TEN THOUSAND TROLLS WILL BURN

Alright. Cool.

He walks back inside, pulls the sword which his owner is so proud of off the wall, walks upstairs, and pokes the pointy end through that blueblooded motherfucker a couple times.

He goes bugfuck insane, thrashing about and shit, which is about what you would expect from being woken up by having a couple feet of steel slide into your viscera. He actually manages to snap the sword in half during his death throes, which means that either he had some real strong ribs, or the quality control on shitty ornamental swords ain’t great.

Dave goes back downstairs once it’s clear he’s dead, carrying the broken sword in its scabbard because why not, and is at a bit of a loss. He didn’t really have a plan, here, besides “finally kill that asshole.”

Then a dude with a couple tanks shows up, and says he’s here to take Dave back to Earth. Dave thinks that, as rescue fantasies go, this is pretty ludicrously contrived, but he goes with him anyway.

There’s that chick he saw in the market that one time, along with her owner, and another kid who isn’t talking much, or at all, really. There’s a weird vibe in the tank, here, lots of Significant Looks being traded back and forth, and Dave decides it’s time to whip out the fucking eloquence.

“Sup.”

Shit, that wasn’t eloquent at all.

“Hello. Rose Lalonde.” Slight awkward pause, then she reaches out her hand. He looks at it for a moment, confused, then figures it out.

“Whoa, hand shaking. _Old_ school. Haven’t done this in _years._ ” He grips it, and they pump, once, then break. “Dave Strider. Pleased to meet you.” Damn he’s smooth.

Hell, let’s keep going. He shakes the hand of the army dude, who’s got his back planted against the hatch, then goes to shake the hand of the kid next to him, except he’s totally out of it, and leaves him hanging. Ouch, rude.

And then he completes the circle, and he realizes the glowing troll is next in line, except that,

  1. He doesn’t really want to shake the hand of a slave owner
  2. Or, for that matter, a Troll, ever
  3. Or, for that matter, a weird-ass Troll vampire-thing or whatever the glowing ones were, he wasn’t clear on that



Except, that! If he doesn’t shake her hand then it becomes a really obvious snub, which seems kinda weird and in poor fuckin’ taste, considering that the humans are in the middle of invading their planet.

In the end, he does shake her hand, after a super obvious hesitation, and then it’s even more weird and awkward because her hands are cuffed together, and she’s a Troll so she’s never shaken hands before anyway and has no idea how to do it.

Wow, Strider, way to completely fuck that up. Real cool.

* * *

They stop outside a rare single-residence building. Stross disappears inside for five tense minutes, before reemerging.

“Rose, I need a translator. Comma–4 isn’t home, and interrogating this guy with a two second lag is driving me nuts.”

“Um.”

“Don’t worry, I got some armor for you.” He duck-walks past her, and pulls a vest off a clip on the wall. “This is actually my spare LBV module. It’ll be a little… large, on you, but it’ll stop a bullet, and that’s the point. The legs won’t fit, though, so it’ll be a little heavy.”

It is a _lot_ heavy.

Rose emerges from the air-conditioned chill of the tank into the heat of the Alternian day, and follows the captain into a Troll-brownstone. She struggles up the stairs, burdened by 20 kilos of fullerine armor, trails him into a room, and stops dead. There is a naked male troll on the floor, spreadeagled on his back, with a robot standing on each leg. Something heavy and blunt has happened to his face, and dark blue blood has carved runnels through the sopor slime still covering his skin.

Jake prods her forward. “Middle of the night for them. We made plenty of noise coming in, and he was only just getting out of the tank when we got here.”

Rose swallows, and averts her eyes. _This must be a test. Don’t screw up now, or else he won’t take you back to Earth._ “He’s highblooded. Getting information out of him won’t be easy.”

“Yes, thank you, Rose, I have discovered this.”

Rose goes to one knee next to the blindfolded troll’s head. “Good evening, sir. You appear to have badly angered this man.”

He manages a sneer. “You are betraying your master, slave. Tell him to free me.”

“That is not going to happen, sir. Where is your human?”

“I ate her.”

Rose leans back, and looks to Jake, still speaking in Alternian. “Trolls do not fear pain so much as they fear becoming less, honored soldier of Earth; less strong, less capable. Crippled. Crush his foot.” She makes a gesture with both hands, and Stross relays it to the robot holding his right leg. The foot it holds begins making greasy popping noises. Impressively, the blueblood doesn’t scream, though he does begin pounding the back of his head against the floor. The drone at his head seizes his horns to keep him from knocking himself out.

The robot finishes destroying his foot, and makes a sharp twisting motion, ripping it from his body entirely. Then it drops the mangled piece of bone and meat on his chest, with a wet splat. Rose averts her eyes, and tries to keep her voice from trembling.

“I apologize for the crude methods we are reduced to, sir, but we are in a hurry. I note that as our time grows short, you too find yourself growing short of limbs.”

“I sold her to a tealblood in Tssthpok. Named Aerrik Intyam.”

Rose relays this. Jake replies, “Yeah, I’m gonna need you to spell ‘Tssthpok’.”

“City next to a river, two hundred kilometres northwest.”

Jake drags a finger along the surface of the tablet. “Population center 2202. Shit, we didn’t think there we any humans there.”

“What did you do?”

“We hit the dam upstream with a KKV. At the very best, they’ll have moved her. Worst case, well… we’ve got an idea of her location, now. Anyway, tell him that we know who he is. If she’s dead, we’re coming after him.”

Rose elaborates. “Mark this well, sir. We know your face now, know the smell of your blood. Should your slave be dead, or even hurt, we shall visit our vengeance on your race as a whole, and _you_ , personally. There is no place where you can flee, no hole you can hide where you should be safe from us. This is no threat, but a promise.”

The troll nods.

“Wow, that was a lot longer than what I said, but he looks pretty scared, so alright. Let’s book it.”

They clatter down the stairs, while Stross reports the location of Comma–4 to the ship.

* * *

Stross hasn’t fired his rifle yet. That’s good: another word for “mission failure” is “an officer forced to fire his weapon in anger”.

But the structure of the post-drone revolution Army is a strange one. He and Mike are the only two humans on the ground. Everything else is either nonsentient or animal-derived. And Mike’s built into a tank, so that leaves Captain Stross the only pair of actual boots on the ground, and also leaves him to fill every rank by himself.

The old guard would have lost their shit at the desecration of two thousand years of tradition, if the vast majority of them hadn’t been killed by the Trolls. There had been briefings on the trolls, Jake remembers. Endlessly long ones, full of scraped together detail and enormous leaps of logic. Shallow comfort for the fact that he was about to be dropped on a planet full of aliens he had never met and could not possibly know, then Make Decisions.

One of the many things they harped on endlessly, besides their bizarre reproductive system, was that you never trust a Troll. The highbloods are, by any human standard, insane. Insanely violent, insanely unpredictable. The lowbloods are near human-standard, except they’ve grown up in Alternian culture, the whole system of their mad, bloodthirsty world, and they’d no more go against that system than a fish could choose to breathe air. Treason means death. _Dissent_ means death. Shoplifting, in fact, is also punishable by death, as there are very few crimes on Alternia which don’t merit capital punishment. An affirmative defense was being smart enough and vicious enough to successfully kill your arresting officer/criminal prosecutor and get away, though there was some debate over that; the pro side arguing that it certainly fit with what we knew of the trolls, and the con side arguing that they couldn’t possibly run a technological civilization like that.

The mission priorities are these:

  1. Destroy vital military infrastructure
  2. Recover human prisoners
  3. Reconnoiter ground forces
  4. Destroy targets of opportunity
  5. Recover data storage devices
  6. Conserve ammunition
  7. Minimize civilian casualties



Numbering them like that makes it seem like they follow a straight line of descending importance, when in fact the line drops off the fucking chart right about number seven. It’s only on the list at all because the brass is worried that the platoon will land and they’ll instantly hare off to slaughter the civvies, forgetting all about the actual mission objectives. Number six is there to underline the point: they need to spend the munitions on the landing boat so they can return more payload to orbit, but the rest of the platoon, the wolf teams, and the Sergeant, all get to stay. Theirs is a one-way ticket. Their specific orders are diverse: some platoons are deployed to lurk in the hills, to fight the long war; others are directed to cause as much mayhem as possible, (without spending too much ammo!) and to get the lay of the land. Eventually they’ll be taking, and holding, Alternia; but for this fight, the idea is a simple exploratory smash and grab.

When Jake initially saw Rose and Kanaya, his first thought was this: Cute couple.

Then his brain kicked in, and he realized that it couldn’t possibly be true. She _owned a slave_ , that was not a “cute couple”. That was, you know, slavery.

But he couldn’t shake that first impression. Kanaya looked nice. Rose looked like she trusted her, and if that was the delusion of a slave long gone over to the darkest depths of Stockholm, then oh well. Jake kept finding himself doing stupid things, turning his back on her when he shouldn’t, letting her _handcuff herself_ for God’s sake.

Not going to be his problem for much longer. All objectives secured, returning to the boat for dustoff.

Stross snaps out of his reverie. The boat. Get back to the boat, solider.

He looks at his tablet, and his frown deepens. No hostiles at all, nothing. It was all _too easy._ The mighty Alternian war machine, scourge of Orion’s Arm, has been entirely content to let Jake roll in, take three of its slaves, and one of its citizens.

He looks at them. 1 has at least an approximation of a tan, but 2 and 4 are fish-belly pale, and all three of them have the pallor inflicted by years of malnutrition. They are a sorry lot. Well, the Troll looks good. Has a nice healthy glow, ah ha ha.

The tank lurches as it veers off the road, and the tenor of the racket of its tracks changes slightly as the terrain changes from fused rock to gravel.

“Five minutes to EVAC!” Stross shouts over the noise.

A fusion-powered combat vehicle can be surprisingly sneaky, when it wants to, but flank speed is not one of those times. It thunders across the desert, showing magnificent disregard for hillocks and folds and the ground, inflicting brutal punishment on its suspension, and raising a dust trail that will be visible for dozens of kilometres.

Gotta get outta here.

They pull up short of the boat, next to the pile of materiel, and the loose squad of dogs he had left to cover his escape. He ushers them out of the tank, and starts leading them at a jog towards the great bulk of the spaceplane.

Comma–1 strays behind, glancing at the tank. Stross manfully resists the urge to scream at her. _Marines! We are **leaving!**_

“Are we leaving him behind?”

Oh. “Mike’s not coming back up on this trip.”

Without the tank, or the fat platoon of combat robots, or the pallets of smart missiles and VLS-packed UAVs, the interior of the landing boat is cavernous. Empty, it’ll accelerate faster, though, which is good. He shows them how to strap themselves down as the loading ramp starts closing and the ship starts rolling along the ground.

He gets himself secured just as the boat goes wheels up, and from there on it’s just another typical hooah balls-out military takeoff, nose angle up at 30 degrees, which feels like straight up-and-down vertical even though it ain’t, then the slowly building shove of the ramjets, increasing until it’s almost intolerable, giving Jake plenty of time to regret not taking off the armor that’s currently trying to squeeze his lungs shut.

And then they make it. They’re in orbit. Jake takes a deep breath, and lets it out in a laugh.

Goddamn he’s hungry.

* * *

The ship is a bewildering array of impressions, strange and alien. It is unspeakably bizarre to see _signs_ written in English, right out there in public, like it’s the dominant language or something.

The orderlies are massive white fabric-padded quadrupedal robots, light on their feet in the ship’s reduced spin gravity. They are clearly of the same family as the war machines she saw on the ground, but they move with a directed purposefulness the dogs lacked, and have none of the overt deadliness of the military vechai. Cops, not soldiers.

They are very concerned about Kanaya. They remove the zipcuffs, but two of them make sure to be within arm’s reach of her at all times. They are thickly padded all over but for the three-clawed grippers which tip each leg. Rainbow drinkers are fast, and immensely strong, but Rose does not like her odds against them.

Almost as soon as they’re onboard, they’re separated for medical examinations. Rose does not like this, but nobody is listening to her.

* * *

The doctor’s face while she studies the MRI images holds a mix of anger and pity that Rose is becoming familiar with.

“Fracture here, here, here, here, organ damage here.” She flips it to the next image. “And they did a real number to your right shoulder. You probably don’t want a full-arm prosthetic, but a joint replacement would be easy enough.” She absently doodles on the image with a stylus. “Incision here… and here, chop out the joint, pop in the replacement, drive a few nails. Easy as pie, take an hour. Week of bed rest, two weeks physical therapy, back to combat readiness.”

“‘Combat readiness?’”

She smiles an apology. “I’m a combat surgeon. You don’t want a joint replacement either? Ah. Back home they would just reprofile the socket, maybe replace some of the damaged muscles, but we’re not set up to do subtle stuff like that, if you’re willing to deal with the limited range of motion for another few weeks.”

“Well, it still works.”

“Right. As for your blood work…” She switches to a screen full of numbers, none of which make any sense to Rose. “I have absolutely no idea how you failed to die of malnutrition. You must be able to synthesize a couple B vitamins most people can’t, because I know I’d be dead after a year on your diet, let alone seven. Have you had problems with fainting spells, or emotional liability?”

“Um. Yes.”

She points at a small number. “Not a whole lot of iron in troll cuisine. Or iodine. Or any of a number of critical Earth-only biomolecules. I’m prescribing a multivitamin,” she types something, and a large machine in the corner begins clunking to itself. “Take it twice a day, with meals, blah blah blah you get the idea.”

Rose drifts over to the machine. It is dropping pills into a prescription bottle, once every two seconds. “How does it work?”

“The machine? It makes the pills one at a time, using, uh, magic. Or something. It can make pretty much any small molecule you care to name. The chief engineer likes fiddling with it.”

The machine finishes, and drops the bottle into the output hopper. Rose pulls it out.

> LALONDE, ROSE  
>  MULTIVITAMIN 1000mg  
>  TAKE TWICE A DAY, WITH MEALS

“I’m pretty sure that’s nanotechnology.”

The doctor holds her hands up in surrender. “Don’t ask me. Talk to the Chief. It sure isn’t like the nanotech in science fiction.”

* * *

“Hello, and welcome to the briefing on Task Group Gallop and Operation Axefall. I am General Henry Dahlia, chief officer of Gallop, with me is Major Annette Oyelana, one of our spaceflight nerds, and Lieutenant Ziegler, one of the NRO/DIA guys on Operation Axefall. This is the first time we’re giving this summary briefing, so forgive us if it might be a little awkward, but we anticipate getting a lot of practice.” Ripple of polite laughter. “Also, if you’re wondering why _I’m_ here, personally, it’s because generals are very busy before an operation starts, but have nothing at all to do _during_ the actual operation. Unless something goes very wrong, which it hasn’t, yet.”

He glances down at his notes. “Right. First of all, a timeline.” The image on the screen behind them changes.

> 1999: Troll War I begins.

> 2001: Neumann package lands on Epsilon Eridani b II

> 2003: Hyperdrive captured.

> 2004: Earth conquered by trolls.

> 2004: Operation Slow-Pitch begins.

> 2005: Troll War I ends. (Most) Prisoners of war repatriated.

> 2011: Slow-Pitch KHA constellation is warped into the outskirts of the Troll home star system.

> 2012/03/01 00:00.00: Operation Axefall begins. Task Force Gallop enters system.

> 00:00.31: First KHA impacts Alternia.

> 00:02.05: First troops make landfall.

“The biggest problem with interstellar travel, by far, is how goddamn far apart stars are. Eridani is next door, but it took a probe, a _small_ probe, decades and thousands of tonnes of fuel to get there. It started making copies of itself, factories, hydrogen plants, etcetera, but human travel was completely out of the picture until we had the Troll hyperdrive. Which brings us to Slow-Pitch, where I’ll pass off to Major Oyelana.”

The Major, a older black woman, nods. “Thank you, General.” The slide changes.

> An enormous industrial complex on a bleak, airless world. A dim, orange sun casts knife-sharp shadows through tangles of machinery that have never been touched by human hands. In the background, an unfamiliar banded blue gas planet shows a crescent face, the dark side lit by the violet sparks of dozens of fusion drives.

“The problem, haha, one of many we faced during Troll War I, is that we couldn’t go on the offense. For the first four years, we didn’t have FTL travel, so we couldn’t attack _anyway_ , and afterwards we couldn’t build them anywhere near fast enough to deploy a credible fleet, and if ever _did_ field a FTL warship, we would instantly become an actual threat. The war ended because they were tired of the fractious natives of a strategically useless planet, and they repatriated the POWs mostly to humor us.”

“Even with hyperdrive, and automated offworld factories, we wouldn’t be able to win a decisive battle. The Empire is large, and we are small. A conventional space battle waged against the Alternian defense system would require a fleet that would take us a hundred years to build, and FTL travel isn’t a secret we could keep for a hundred years. If nothing else, it would eventually occur to the Trolls to check the neighboring stars.”

She gestures at the screen behind her. “Epsilon Eridani b II is the formal name of the second moon of planet _b_ , Epsilon Eridani’s only gas giant. Epsilon is a K2 variable star, smaller and colder than the Sun, and also the closest star to Earth that has a planetary system, which makes it an obvious target for sub-light colonization. This picture was taken in 2008, seven years after the von Neumann package landed. At the time Operation Slow-Pitch began in 2004, it was Earth’s only operational offplanet manufacturing facility.”

 _2004,_ Rose thinks. _The year I was taken from Earth. They’ve been planning this all that time._

The slide changes to an animation.

> A single point of light traces a complicated curve through a planetary system, leaving behind a trail. Another point of light traces a slightly different path, and then another.

“Epsilon Eridani is 799 light years away from HD 102272, the Troll’s home star system. A quirk of the hyperdrive is that it takes relatively little power to actually jump between two points; most of the time and energy is spent getting out to where spacetime is flat, and accounting for the relative velocities of the two stars. HD 102272 orbits farther out in the Milky Way, so the relative velocity between it and Gliese is 16 kilometres per second.”

“The idea behind Operation Slow-Pitch is this. Take asteroids orbiting Epsilon Eridani, plate a thin layer of some conductive material on them, so the hyperdrive has the electrically continuous and topologically closed object that it needs, then jump them to HD 102272, where they’ll smack into Alternia.”

This produces some reaction. She waits it out. “It was, of course, more complicated than that.”

“We wanted all the KHAs to hit around the same time, so that Operation Axefall could capitalize on the confusion, and recover POWs with a minimum of resistance. Since all the rocks would approach along the exact same vector, which is the vector of relative velocity between the two stars, and because we wanted even coverage across the entire planet, we had a target window of 24 hours and 22 minutes, the length of an Alternian day. We also needed to target them precisely, since we had a limited amount of resources, and wanted to maximize the military effectiveness of every single harpoon. This was… challenging. They had to navigate the gravity wells of two different star systems, time the hyperdrive jumps very, very precisely, and even account for gravitational attraction between individual rocks in the KHA constellation. They had cold-gas thrusters for stationkeeping during the cruise phase, and large chemical rockets for targeting during final approach.”

“Lastly, they needed to not be seen. They were small, fast, and approaching from a completely unexpected vector; but in order for the hyperdrive signatures of the tugs not to be detected by Alternian defense network, they had to be jumped in from fairly far away, and the long dwell time would give them plenty of opportunity to be noticed. For that, I’ll hand it over to Dan.”

“Thank you, Ann.” Dan Ziegler is a nervous young man, probably not much older than Rose herself. “Stealth in space is impossible. Can’t be done. A ship underway produces a plume of incandescent gas and energetic photons you can see from tens of millions of kilometres away. Even with the drive off, you still have to run the reactor for electrical power, which produces neutrinos which absolutely cannot be blocked by anything, and you have to radiate away your waste heat. At the very least, your hull’s gonna be glowing in the infrared. There’s some dodges and tricks, but the bottom line is, you can’t hide a ship. Rocks, however, aren’t ships.”

Slide change.

> An asteroid in schematic view, hidden behind an enormous square panel, at least half again larger than the asteroid on each side.

“This is an individual Slow-Pitch Kinetic HArpoon. It’s sitting behind a film of aluminum that’s a couple hundred micrometers thick, supported by a composite spaceframe truss. The aluminum’s chilled using liquid helium down to the same temperature as the cosmic microwave background, so it doesn’t show up on infrared, and it’s flat, so it reflects away radar. Unless it was axis-on to someone looking right at it, which we were hoping wouldn’t happen, and, luckily, didn’t. It’s also mirror flat, and a mirror is completely invisible in space.”

“It’s not perfect. A human or a troll would never be able to see it, but a computer would instantly notice that the stars wouldn’t be in the right places. Fortunately, KHAs are small, so you require high magnification, and any telescope looking at a starfield at high magnification will also be using long exposures, and they move way too fast to show up on a 5 minute exposure. Again, you would need to know _exactly_ where to look, and be using _exactly_ the right combination of equipment to see them, and they never did that.”

“Eventually, they were going to get close enough that a short-exposure sky-survey astrophotograph would pick them up, or a defense platform would hit them with a radar beam from an angle they’re not protected from, but by then it’s too late. A laser does nothing against a rock. A nuke does precious little but shift its approach angle a little. You either have to land a tug, or precisely detonate a series of bombs in the same spot, which they didn’t do.”

> A map of Alternia. Red dots are scattered across the unfamiliar land masses.

“Seven hundred and ninety six KHAs were deployed. Twelve had technical problems that kept them from making the jump, and one hit a rock in the enemy star system that we hadn’t charted, which gave us a real scare, I can tell you that; but the other 783 hit their targets. Dams, power plants, ports, bridges, highway interchanges, tunnels, rail depots, army bases, airfields, spaceports, munitions plants, nuclear weapons production facilities, etc, etc, et al.”

“Only pure civilian target was the Mother Grub. Estimated casualties are in the low ten thousands, certainly much less than what they inflicted on Earth, and a whole lot less than what the civilians were demanding that we inflict, but any higher and we were risking hitting some of our prisoners; that being the goal of the whole operation.”

“Oh, and of course, we wiped out everything they had in space. KHAs hit anything with a predictable orbit, and we also had four dozen missile buses in the mix, each with 150 independently targetable 100 megaton warheads. These used chemical engines, and weren’t real well armored, so Troll point-defenses did pretty well against them. 4 in 5 were intercepted. Only 1 in 10 could be considered”near" or “direct” hits. That 1 in 10 still had a combined 72 thousand megatons of explosive yield."

“Now, Troll ‘electronics’ are more or less completely EMP-hard. But it sure as hell took out their radios, and absolutely every civilian satellite in orbit. Nothing that isn’t a military landing boat is going to be getting through the debris field from space to ground on Alternia for decades, if not more.” He looked at the General. Dahlia nodded.

“Very good, Lieutenant. This briefing is going better than I expected! Now, Operation Axefall has two goals. Firstly, to recover the remaining prisoners of war, and secondly— oh, I’ve got a quote here, ‘to permanently remove the threat the Alternian species poses to humanity, to utterly crush their ability to wage war on the planets of Man, to destroy their debased and vile civilization completely.’”

He peers over the top of his glasses. “That was, ah, from a speech UN Premier Ngyuen gave a couple years ago. There’s been some political changes since y’all been on Earth.”

“We hit Alternia, and are evacuating the human prisoners of war. Civilization there has fallen, and will not have the chance to rise again. But we’re not cleared for long-term occupation of the system. The Alternian Fleet is mostly intact, and ELINT sources tell us they’re massing in staging areas to retake the system. We have, at most, three days before we have to retreat. This is a lightning raid, not an invasion.”

Oh.

“Now, you might be wondering why we just pissed off the trolls, if we can’t destroy their fleet, or win a standup flight. This just seems like all we’ve done is invite the destruction of Earth.”

Um.

“Not gonna happen. Three reasons.”

He holds up a single finger. “One. A spacebourne navy is the very tip of a mile-high pyramid, supported by the efforts of ten million different specialists, and the output of a hundred thousand different factories. To keep a spacecraft flying, you need an industrial civilization, to act as the foundation. That foundation is gone, and so the navy shall fall.”

“Two. The Empress is in hiding, her homeworld is smashed, and the Mother Grub is dead. The Condencense’s thousand-year reign is over, and without her the Empire will descend into civil war. We’re already seeing infighting dirtside, and there’s no reason to think the Navy will cooperate any better, once they push us out of local space.”

“Three. We’re not in this fight alone.”

> A star map of the local galactic neighborhood. Two stars acquire names: Sol and HD 102272. Spheres of influence appear: a lonely blue dot representing the UN, dwarfed by the vast cancerous tumor of the Troll Empire, in red.

> Then a half-dozen more territories appear, intimately entangled with the Empire, in a rainbow of shades. They sprout broad colored arrows, all of them pointing _in._

“Contemporaneously with Axefall, and immediately after the development of FTL travel, we began one hell of a diplomatic campaign. The Trolls have made a lot of enemies. Now, it’s all immensely complicated, and I’m skipping over a lot of boring details about interspecies communication and zero-knowledge proofs here, but the upshot is that three other civilizations have launched military operations loosely coordinated with Slow-Pitch, timed to begin as the Trolls pull border fleets back to defend the homeworld. Others have been… less cooperative, but they’ll probably initiate hostilities when the Trolls start losing star systems.”

“So, that’s the plan. Smash and grab, hightail it back to Earth, and wait for the Empire to collapse. Right. Questions?”

There are a few, all of which are so shallow that they trouble Rose’s concentration not at all. _The Mother Grub is dead?_ She is suddenly very glad that Kanaya had not been allowed into the briefing.

A question from the crowd attracts her attention. “What happened to their moon?”

"Ah, yes. That was from Operation _Fast_ -Pitch. Uh, Major?

“Thank you, General. I believe I have a video of the impact here, in fact, if you will give me a minute…”

There is the requisite two minutes of embarrassment that happens whenever you connect a computer to a large screen in front of an audience, ever. Everybody learns rather more than they wanted about Major Oyelana, including her desktop background (kittens playing in flowers) and filing system. (`My Documents/crap/more crap/other crap/shit/20120301impactvideofinished(final)(2).mpg`)

> The green moon of Alternia, massive and desolate, hangs in the center of the frame. A bright point of light drifts into view from the right. A slowly incrementing milliseconds counter at the bottom of the screen reveals that this is being shot in slow motion, tens of thousands of frames-per-second.

> The spark gently touches down, and there is a flashbulb-bright explosion of blue-white light. The screen clears, and we see a massive, expanding cloud of vaporized rock, glowing incandescent from the violence of the impact. City-sized shards of rock twirl lazily through the vacuum, shedding droplets of molten basalt as they spin. It all takes place in the dreadful, eerie silence of space.

“Slow-Pitch had a limited delta-V against the Alternian system, operating as it did from a local star system.”

“Fast-Pitch 1, however, was a rock from the opposite side of the Milky Way, which adds the galactic rotational velocity to the delta-V. It was tremendously expensive just to decelerate a Neumann package into the system, but there’s a 400 kilometre per second difference between Alternia and the Fast-Pitch system. Since kinetic energy increases as the _square_ of the velocity, this means a Fast-Pitch KHA has _six hundred and twenty five_ times the energy of a Slow-Pitch. Fast-Pitch 1, the rock that hit Alternia II, was only 50 metres wide, but it had an explosive yield of 11,190 megatons of TNT.”

> The massive crater in the face of the green moon, still glowing red hot two days after the impact.

“Slow-Pitch is a strategic weapon, used against strategic targets. Missile fields, spaceports, etc., etc.; I’ve been over this. But Fast-Pitch can kill civilizations. Hit an ocean, the vaporized ocean water reflects sunlight, the planet cools off, you get months of rain, crops die, etc. Standard nuclear winter ice age scenario. It can get worse than that: if the planet gets cold enough, the carbon dioxide snows out of the air and accumulates on the poles. Without carbon dioxide in the air, you lose the greenhouse effect, the planet gets even colder, and the oxygen starts snowing out. That’s the endgame, folks, there ain’t no coming back from that.”

* * *

Her psychological assessment had been scheduled after the briefing. The waiting room is actually a common area, with several offices opening off of it. Doctor Albert Penzler had greeted them both, then elected to speak to Kanaya first, leaving Rose out in the cold, and twitchy, knowing that the topic of the conversation was Rose, Man Oh Man Is She Crazy.

True to form, the waiting room is fully stocked with outdated magazines, but the impossible science-fictional date of 2011 on all the covers tends to ruin the effect. Another odd note: they’ve all been laser-printed on letter paper, then hand-stapled together. The October 2011 edition of the Atlantic which she’s currently puzzling through was somehow printed with one page missing from the original file, throwing all the two-page spreads askew.

She is very obviously missing eight years of context, here. There are some things which make perfect sense, and other things which are so completely baffling that they cast doubt on her earlier confidence. The word _phone_ seems to have a lot more meaning attached to it now. Rose had a cell phone in 2004, of course. She used it to make calls, because it was a phone, and that’s what phones did.

They were issued phones when they boarded ship, and told to keep them handy at all times. Rose thought this ridiculous. Who was she going to call? But it was more “computer” than anything else. You could use it to read books, (slowly) write messages, take pictures.

Amusingly, bulkhead doors won’t open for you if you aren’t carrying your phone, because it also acts as a sort of ID card. Crewmembers can use it to find you, since it also constantly broadcasts your location. Rose also suspects that the microphone can also be used to listen in on conversations, which is probably paranoid of her. In any event, it is a uniquely human take on the slave collar. Where the Trolls are all stick, the Human version is pure carrot, giving great advantage, rather than threatening with punishment.

The _goal_ is the same, though.

She sighs. _How very typical of you, Rose. You carry your cage everywhere you go, and insist on looking at everything through its bars._

What was _taking_ them so long? How much time could that conversation possibly take? Yes, one day I decided to buy a human, and by the time I figured out what a terrible servant she was the return period was up and I was stuck with her. Fortunately, you fellows showed up and took her off my hands, so if I could get a ride back to Alternia, where I can find a much less melodramatic matespirit, that’d be great.

The heavy, soundproof (as Rose had discovered earlier) door opens, and Kanaya emerges.

“How was it?”

Kanaya blinks. “Well. It was much like talking to you.”

“What?”

Penzler laughs. “Very funny! Come on in, Rose, let’s have a chat.”

Albert Penzler is bald. Albert Penzler is a man so thoroughly bald that the very idea of hair ever besmirching his skin seems laughably impossible, like walking naked through a snowstorm, or building a house out or meringue. He shaves twice a year, and the fine white hairs of his sparse eyebrows blend in perfectly with his skin.

He proceeds her into his office, then flops down onto the couch. He reaches over and pats the chair next to it. “You sit here, and psychoanalyze me, while I lie on this comfy couch. Maybe I’ll take a nap. It’ll be fun!”

Rose sits, with a sigh. “Okay, Doctor, what do you want to talk about?”

“Maybe you can shed some light on this awful dream I had. It was my mother, smoking a cigar. She was really enjoying it, too, just sucking, and sucking, and sucking… Then it turned into a penis, and ejaculated the words ‘THIS IS A METAPHOR’. Now what the fuck does _that_ mean?”

“No doubt a representation of your latent fear of cigars.”

“That must be it. Then I had a dream about a slave who fell in love with her mistress, probably just because she knew it would piss off a whole lot of people back on Earth.”

“… Oh. Right to brass tacks, then.”

“First things first. You are on an UN military vessel. There is absolutely no possibility of being recaptured, mostly because they’d rather blow this ship up than try and clear it. You’re completely safe from reprisal, here. Say the word, we’ll lock her up, and you’d never have to see the Troll again.”

“No.”

“Okay. So you would say that you and Kanaya are,” he says, choosing his words very carefully, “A Thing?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. That makes things both easier and harder.” He thinks for a moment. “Personally, I think you two are a perfectly nice couple. _You’ve_ got a bucket full of issues, and Kanaya’s from a culture we’ve deemed so vile that we’re stamping it out with orbital bombardment, but you somehow go well together. However, I’m a sensitive and tolerant guy, who has come to that conclusion after spending half an hour interviewing both parties. Selling the citizens of Earth on that conclusion is going to be hard. Real, real hard.” He sighs. “At least you’re gay. That makes it a lot easier.”

“Excuse me?”

He cranes his head back to look at her. “If your owner was male, Stross would have shot him on sight, and it wouldn’t have mattered how you felt about it. You know this to be true.”

“As well as the most purely and literally sexist thing ever said.”

“Heh.”

* * *

Some time later:

“Since this is ostensibly a therapy session, and not a lecture—” “Haha, zing!” “—I would like to unburden myself of something.”

Penzler makes an open gesture with one hand. She continues. “While we were escaping, Captain Stross asked me if an approaching vehicle was a friend. When I said no, he destroyed it with a missile. It was, in fact, Misstrrrr— ahem, Kanaya’s kismesis.”

“Ah, troll romance. Kismesis is the, uh, hatelover, yes?”

“That’s one way of putting it. Another is ‘intimate rivals.’ A kismesis is a sexual partner. Additionally, the kismesisstude was not entirely requited; Vriska had only black feelings for Kanaya, while Kanaya held flushed aspirations.”

“What was Vriska like?”

“She was highblooded.”

“Ah.”

“That, and she beat me until I was unconscious, once.”

He spreads his hands. “Sounds like a good kill to me. You won’t fear prosecution from Earth authorities.”

“I’m more concerned with what Kanaya will think.”

He thinks about it for a while. “Well, that’s complicated. Firstly, I’m a human psychologist, not a troll one, you are far more the domain expert here than I am. Secondly, if I thought that telling her the truth would cause Kanaya to want nothing to do with you, then I might be tempted to say that, and thus solve a thorny political problem.” He sighs. “Alas, ethics.”

“I can’t really give any advice here. Do what seems best, I guess?”

Rose isn’t really listening. ‘Domain expert’, eh? She supposes her half-joking plans for a memoir are shelved, now. She can’t think of any possible way to slant it that wouldn’t make her and Kanaya’s lives immensely worse. She’ll still _write_ it, of course, just to get it out of her head, but publishing that book isn’t something that is going to happen for years. Decades.

But writing the definitive textbook on troll psychology? Why, she could start that right now, if she wants. She blinks, and realizes that the therapist had stopped talking quite some time ago. “Such a charmingly informal style you have, Doctor.”

“Well, consider the job. I can’t fix all of you, just keep you stable for the trip back to Earth. Catch the suicidals, medicate those I need to, keep a general eye on the rest. There’s no _time_ for anything else. 750 ex-slaves on this ship alone, remember. Calls for something like a… battlefield psychologist.”

“How very personal.”

He smiles at the ceiling. “Want me to change the laws of physics for you, Rose?”

“Yes please.”

A lull. “Alright, let’s go see Henry.”

He stands decisively, and Rose echoes his movement with a great deal more uncertainty. “Who?”

“The Big Man. General Dahlia? You just came from one of his briefings. He’s got enough information, now, to make a decision.”

Oh shit.

* * *

They wait outside the wardroom. Rose turns to face Kanaya squarely. “Alright. This is the moment. He wouldn’t have brought me along if they were just planning on shoving you out of an airlock, which means the Doctor has a scheme of some kind. My advice is, if they ask you to do anything, agree immediately and without hesitation.”

They enter. It is a literal tribunal, General Dahlia sitting behind a desk, a woman Rose didn’t recognize seated in front of it, and Doctor Penzler standing in a corner, poorly restraining a smile.

Dahlia looks at Kanaya over the tops of his glasses. “Kanaya Maryam. Do you want to join the United Nations Space Navy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that was easy.” The General folds his hands. “The legal situation is complicated. There are a number of Alternian nationals serving in the UNSN, which means there is precedent, but they’re mostly defectors and other special cases. Additionally, they were naturalized citizens of UN member nations prior to enlisting. You would need to demonstrate a plausible path to citizenship, as well as _strong ties to the nation in question,_ before taking the oath.” He turns his gaze to Rose. “A lot’s changed since you’ve been on the homeworld, Miss Lalonde, but the United States is still a UN member.”

_What an odd thing to say. Oh—_

_Oh **shit.**_

“Are you a justice of the peace, sir?”

He nods to his left. “Captain Fujiwara is.”

“Do you have, ah, a ring?”

He pushes forward a small box, covered in black velvet. Rose opens it, and looks inside. Yep, that’s a wedding ring.

Kanaya looks very confused. Her confusion is not abated by Rose going to one knee.

“Kanaya Maryam. Will you marry me?”

**Author's Note:**

> A throwaway line halfway through Seam By Seam implied that Earth was fighting a full-bird interstellar war in 1999. This requires a slightly different timeline than ours, considering that 13 years later there's only one country on the planet that still has manned spaceflight.
> 
> 1959: Philo Farnsworth conceives of [inertial electrostatic confined](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confinement) fusion. Unlike in our universe, though, he immediately notices that the internal grids will intercept too many fuel ions, and in an incredibly unlikely stroke of genius, conceives of the [Polywell magnetically-shielded IEC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell) fusion reactor design.
> 
> 1962: Crash project generously funded by the War Department produces the world’s first commercial fusion power plant.
> 
> 1963: Ralph Moir conceives of [direct charged-particle energy conversion process](http://www.askmar.com/Fusion_files/Venetian%20Blind.pdf) ten years early. Miniaturized fusion reactors for spacecraft become practical.
> 
> 1965: First fusion-powered spacecraft launched. Man walks on moon four years early.
> 
> 1968: Man walks on moon of Jupiter, Europa.
> 
> 1972: First commercial hydrogen mine in orbit around Jupiter comes online.
> 
> 1973: First permanent settlement on Moon founded.
> 
> 1974: First interstellar probe passes through the Centauri system.
> 
> 1975: [Advanced Automation in Space Exploration](http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASMIndex.html) study published five years early, and with dramatically greater resources. First-generation self-replicating machines go into wide use, increasing the manufacturing output of offworld colonies by orders of magnitude.
> 
> 1991: Rose Lalonde is born.
> 
> 1998: Self-replicating interstellar probe goes into orbit around Alpha Centauri.
> 
> 1999: First Contact with alien life made. Troll War I begins. Rose is 8.
> 
> 2001: Self-replicating interstellar probe lands on the moon of Epsilon Eridani b.
> 
> 2003: First operational copy made of a hyperdrive module savaged from an Alternian hulk. Ultra-high temperature superconductors discovered. Molecular nanotechnology discovered. Ansible supralight communications discovered. Neutrino optics discovered. X-ray laser technology discovered. Reversible transistor logic discovered. Molecular electronics discovered.
> 
> 2004: Earth conquered by trolls. Rose is 13.0833. (‘Thirteen and a month’)
> 
> 2004: Crewed starship arrives at the Epsilon Eridani system, which the Trolls still believe to be entirely uninhabited. Operation Slow-Pitch begins.
> 
> 2005: Troll War I ends. Prisoners of war repatriated. Rose is 14.
> 
> 2009: Kanaya purchases a slave. Rose is 18.
> 
> 2010: Self-replicating interstellar probe warps into the [DATA REDACTED] system. Operation Fast-Pitch begins.
> 
> 2011: Slow-Pitch KHA constellation is warped into the outskirts of the Troll home star system. Rose is 20.
> 
> 2011/11/11: The Hokkaido-class frigate, UNSN 2011–55 (informal name _This Time We Mean It_ ) is constructed by twenty-fifth generation self replicating machines in orbit around Gliese 581.
> 
> 2012/02/13: Self-replicating interstellar probe warps into the [DATA REDACTED] system. Operation Genesis begins.
> 
> 2012/03/01 00:00.00: Formal declaration of war issued. Troll War II begins. Operation Axefall begins. Task Group Gallop enters system.
> 
> 00:00.31: The first KHA impacts Alternia.
> 
> 00:02.05: First troops make landfall.


End file.
